Hot Baths and Cold Calls
I was on a Zoom call the other day (our new normal) with some folks from the Modern Elder Academy, a retreat/conference that I attended a little over a year ago. The academy is a midlife school for those of us 40+ who want to apply our lived wisdom and to continue to learn and grow as we age so we can live the very best second half of our lives.
The focus of this particular call, was to offer each other wisdom, advice and comfort in this unprecedented time of a global pandemic. We were asked to share in our breakout group a time we had overcome an adversity and what we found worked in those situations that might be applied to what we’re dealing with today. People spoke of journaling and meditation, exercise and dancing. Others talked about needing to get outside in nature, to have a schedule that they stick to or to replicate as much of their normal lives as possible.
I shared about a particularly hard time in my life. I was trying to leave an unhealthy relationship and living 1,000 miles from my community. I was completely broke and so depressed, I cried every day. Worst of all, I didn’t even have my dog with me. It was the lowest I’d ever been in my life. I knew I needed to kick myself into action to get my life back on track, but I also knew, I needed to be gentle and heal my heart.
I got up the courage to leave and on the long drive from Southern California to Portland, I decided I would take two actions every day. Each day I would do one thing to challenge me and one thing to comfort me. I called it Hot Baths and Cold Calls. One day I might reach out to an acquaintance for an informational job interview and then meet up with friends to watch a basketball game. Another I would work on my resume and then take my dog for a walk in nature.
Taking two actions each day really helped me get through that tough time and onto the next phase of my life. In fact, I ended up somewhere I could have never imagined when I started that drive.
I’m going to do that again in this time of uncertainty. I don’t know when I’ll be able to travel and what the world will look like when that time comes. But I know I can focus each day on doing two small things to keep me moving forward. My cold call today: sitting down to write this. I’ve been having a hard time focusing during this pandemic. My anxiety has been taking over and I find it hard to sit still long enough to write. My hot bath: watching a few episodes of Schitt’s Creek on Netflix.
Tomorrow I’ll do an online yoga class and have a phone date with my brother. Later in the week I’ll spend some time brushing up on SEO and then dancing in my living room as a DJ spins a Zoom dance party. I don’t know where I’ll end up when all this is over. But I hope it is someplace beautiful and someplace I can’t imagine from where I sit now.
What about you? What are you doing to get through these tough and uncertain times?
By the way, I gave a PechaKucha talk about my Hot Baths and Cold Calls experience in March of 2018. PechaKucha is a storytelling format where each presenter has 20 slides of 20 seconds each and they need to tell their story within that format. You can see my PechaKucha talk here.
